Originally posted by OzJ
I'm not surprised and I expected this when the MOU's were first announced, but they didn't make that part obvious. The Diamonds only provide two twenty-minute windows of connectivity a day. That's not enough time to do anything but the simplest connectivity and transaction tests to see if this is real. Certainly not enough time to do anything like acceptance testing on the SAS setup.
This brings up a point I've pondered about the 20 Pearls and the types of services they could offer. Given that the constellation needs to have some sort of shape for the sats to communicate with each other and since they will all go up and be deployed in one or two launches, the odds are good that they will be grouped in one or two groups. Together they will possibly offer something like 2 1/2 hours of coverage a day (either in one hit or two 1 1/4 passes every day). That could be enough to support asynchronous transactions like some IOT and M2M messaging. Perhaps some asynchronous payment transfer or other messaging apps.
Additionally, those windows will only enable SAS device to SAS device comms unless there is also a network tower in range when the sat window is overhead. So perhaps Sat Space Africa will cover this to some extent, enabling larger network access for the Pearls over parts of Africa. There are a lot of MOU's signed up for the Pearls which makes me think there are a number of use cases that don't involve synchronous connectivity. Those won't be available until the 200 are completely up, or near enough to 200 to provide continuous coverage.
So, I guess this all comes down to... funding. (I thought I would get that in myself before someone else states the bleeding obvious for the 49 millionth time.)
I don't follow your logic. Isn't the 200 satellite constellation going to be spread across 5 partially overlapping orbits? That would mean each orbit is 40 satellites. If the first 20 sats are placed in the same orbit, then I would expect they would wrap half way around the Earth (once correctly positioned). That would mean the first 20 sats could provide about 12 hours/day coverage. This coverage wouldn't be for the entire equatorial region however, just the area under the first chosen orbital path.
I know I'm making some assumptions here, but I think it adds up given the information at hand.
